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Several members of the OpenROAD Engineering team will be running a code Sprint at the Thistle City Barbican hotel in London on June 8th, 9th, and half day on the 10th followed by the UK AUA 1-daytechnical conference on June 11th, at which there will be several OpenROAD Specific presentations.

Join the OpenROAD Sprint June 8th - 10th in London
Sprint projects tend to be 4GL projects as they can be implemented quickly. How do we determine the projects implemented at a sprint?...

On Terminate event is currently valid only in frame scripts. An enhancement request, SIR 122582, for this event to be valid in field scripts is under review for possible inclusion in a future release. In the meantime, an alternative solution is to write a facility in 4GL code that provides equivalent results to this proposed feature, one that even offers a more flexible and complete solution. This article describes alternative ways to implement this solution.

Problem

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I'm almost finished ranting. For now.

So far I've shown that being scared of natural keys is about as grown-up and professional as being scared of balloon animals. I still need to show why properly diligent database designers must actively shun surrogate keys until they are absolutely unavoidable.

If you skipped Part 2 of this series of postings to get to the "juicy bits" you should go back and read it now.

I've already established the very...

In the previous section I showed that natural keys—including composite natural keys—can perform fine. In my extensive experience they usually do.

There are exceptional cases when they don't do so well though, and so a surrogate key is justified.

A big VARCHAR key can be a problem when we try to use it as a physical key. For instance the biggest VARCHAR that can be used as a physical key in an Ingres B-tree is 1,000 characters. If your key is longer than...

If you made the effort to wade through part 2 of this series you have seen my claim that keys should be simple. Who could argue?

A simple key is one which is easy to use. It is easy to use if it is easy to think about and it performs well in the physical database. If the conceptual model leads naturally to a certain physical key in the database, and if the end-users who own the data are familiar and comfortable with it, and if it performs adequately, there is no reason not to use...